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  • The Wives of the Stadtholdersby Dobrochna Futro et al.
  • Rebecca Tucker (bio)
The Wives of the Stadtholders. Online exhibition under the auspices of Early Modern Letters Online, a project of Huygens ING in collaboration with Oxford University's Cultures of Knowledge project, with the cooperation of the Koninklijke Verzmelingen, Nationaal Archiev, and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, the Bodleian Library, and the Landeshauptarchiev Dessau. Organized by Dobrochna Futro Ineke Huysman, Milo van de Pol, Matthew Wilcoxson under the direction of Arno Bosse. http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/sw/

Many stories of powerful women in the European political system during the seventeenth century remain to be told. High-ranking aristocratic women were important political figures, as well as scientific, literary, and artistic patrons. The online exhibition, "The Wives of the Stadtholders," highlights six such women in the Northern Netherlands between 1600 and 1700; each married an important political figure. On the web page's consistent header, one finds the goal of the exhibition: to "analyze female power and influence in the political circles of the Dutch Republic at the Orange and Stuart courts in The Hague and their counterparts at the Frisian court in Leeuwarden."

The site has three main components. The first offers biographies of six women: Amalia von Solms-Braunfels and Albertine Agnes, both from the Oranje-Nassau family; Mary I Stuart and Mary II Stuart; Sophia Hedwig of Brauschweig-Wolfenbüttel; and, finally, Henriette Amalia of Anhalt-Dessau. Each of these women was married to—and some were mothers of—a Stadtholder. The position of Stadtholder, often translated as "governor," was an unusual one in seventeenth-century European political systems. The Stadtholder served as a military leader, foreign policy advisor, and political consultant for the states of the Dutch Republic. The House of Orange-Nassau held most of these [End Page 171]Stadtholderships, with the exception of Friesland's, which fell to the cadet branch of the extended family, that of Nassau-Dietz. The wives of the Stadholders were thus intimately connected to local, regional, and international events, whether the complex political operations of the republic, the waging of wars, or the dynastic concerns of the sprawling Nassau family. Alongside the work of scholars such as Saskia Beranek, Susan Broomhall, and Jacqueline van Gent, this exhibition provides an entry into investigations of the historical intersection of aristocratic women, dynastic concerns, and social and political networks.

A second major element in the exhibition covers the epistolary activity of these six well-connected women. The curators have selected ten letters for their insights into "the different types of correspondence and spheres of activity in which they [the Stadtholder's wives] were involved." One can find personal and emotional topics (such as the last letter received by Sophia Hedwig from her gravely wounded son) as well as one devoted to issues of dynastic importance (such as Henrietta Amalia's "lobbying" for her son's accession to the stadtholdership of Friesland), and even day-to-day vignettes (such as an update on Frederik Hendrik that Amalia van Solms received from Constantijn Huygens while they were both on campaign).

Visual material, primarily prints, forms the final part of the online exhibition; they illustrate the palaces and castles where the women lived. The inclusion of images of the "physical centers of power" seems to be intended to frame and enrich the viewer's understanding of the lives of these women by portraying the domestic and administrative environments they inhabited. A modern digital map of the Netherlands combines the three pieces of the exhibition into one platform. Each content essay contains secondary links to the others, and to further information and bibliographic sources, as well as links to the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) database. For example, after viewing Huygen's letter to Amalia of 1633, one could access the EMLO database and locate other pieces of Amalia's extensive correspondence with Huygens, an exchange of over one thousand letters that have been studied by Ineke Huysman, one of the contributors to the exhibition.

Anyone who has worked on non-royal women in this period knows the difficulties of conducting such research, and has confronted both methodological problems...

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